Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC), circa £48 for a 5 day course (+50% discount)

Access to site licenses for MTA and MOS exams

The additional costs after the initial membership fee would be for printed content and certification, if you wanted to adopt and embed them in to your courses.

Below, I have listed some prices for both the MCP and MTA (site licence) exams at various volumes

MCP could be embedded in to the courses and funded through students themselves or subsidised through the course fees

The IET do recognise the MCP certification towards proving the technical skills for IET membership, see here

MTA – looking at the courses you offer and number of students, I would imagine that the 500 pack could be relatively low risk and you could take advantage of the phone camps and interest in gaming to allow students to certify on these technologies now?

You can see the objective specifications for the MTA exams here to understand how they could support your programming/mobile and gaming courses here

We provide free Student Study Guides and Exam Review Kits for these Link is here

There is additional printed curriculum (MOAC) through Wiley publishers

Content, Certification & Currency

We like to think that we have certifications and a portfolio of content (courseware, elearning etc) available for all major releases of Microsoft products including Cloud services such as Azure

We also have a strategy to release courseware and exams for key technologies when they are in beta e.g. current System Center 2012 and forthcoming SQL vNext etc

Moving forward, the plan is to release full exams and content within 1 month of full product release including dedicated MTA Developer certification and a HTML 5 MTA which due for release later this month

Support for ITAcademies & Getting Started

We have academic support partners that can do some of the handholding for you

Prodigy Learning – they can help set up the MTA/MOS exams on site with testing facilities at no additional cost

Prometric – our partner for MCP, like Prodigy they will support and set up the test center on site at no extra charge. You can become a public test site for additional revenue

We hope this information helps get more professional development for students and staff and it seems a shame that a number of Universities aren’t taking use of the IT Academy to address employability and staff development

Just send a email from your UK Academic email address, including your Job title and institution to ukfac@microsoft.com

We want you to be assured that Faculty Connection is a community of your peers, so that's why we ask all members to complete this initial step we will then send you a Faculty Connection verification code to allow you to register to this resource and community of peers.

We want you to stay connected to the UK Faculty Connection program and by subscribing to the Faculty Connection resources including the Linkedin Group and dedicated newsletters we can keep up-to-date on the latest information about new curriculum resources, research projects, software tools, workshops, etc.

There are puzzles, learning exercises, and duels. Register and you can create your own challenges. The puzzle structure is a great demonstration of Pex. When you start a new puzzle, you have a empty implementation. You can click Ask Pex to get some test results on the hidden successful implementation. Pex then executes those tests on your code.

Learning

Students will learn as they see some failures, and you can fix your code to make the tests pass. Student can click “Ask Pex” to see if a more extensive test suite still passes. Iterating this way not only helps students understand fundamentals but also enables them to write better code and its tested to see if their implementation gets closer to the expected solution. If you are not familiar with Test Driven Development, this is a great tools for teaching the concept.

All in all, there are several reasons you should consider integrating FREE resource like PexForFun into your curricula or vocational training resources:

It is ideal to get students aware of and practicing Test Driven Development. you start with an empty implementation, and see a few failing tests. Keep making a few pass and you’ll get more tests. After a few iterations you’ll have everything working.

It will give students practice writing tests. Pex generates tests by analysing their code. It determines a number of interesting inputs to code by analysing its structure. You can read an overview here By seeing the inputs it chooses, The outcome is that students get ideas and real understanding of how to write their own tests. By thinking about inputs it chooses to ignore, students can get better at writing useful concise tests instead of simply creating more tests.

Plex helps exercises students brains and refreshes that to principles and concepts. The puzzles range from introductory to rather complicated.

TouchDevelop (New name for TouchStudio) is an Windows Phone 7 App that allows the users to script with their phone. By bringing bringing programming to the Windows Phone it not only great fun but productive too, especially from a learning perspective. In the video below Nikolai Tillmann and Michal Moskal from Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) at Microsoft Research give a demo of TouchStudio

In the video below Nikolai Tillmann from Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) at Microsoft Research give a case study of TouchDevelop being used by School children developing an app in 45mins directly on the device

In this video, Grant Bronsdon, a intern at Microsoft Research, gives a quick tutorial on writing scripts in TouchDevelop

Another great tool is Pex4Fun. Pex4fun is another project from Research in Software Engineering (RiSE). PexforFun have a dedicated web site application which allows programming in C#, Visual Basic, and F# from your browser. Now the team has released a Windows Phone mobile app which allows you to do the same in Windows Phone 7 titled Pex4Fun.

The difference between Touch Studio and Pex4Fun is that Pex4Fun is a learning tool, you can win points by writing code! You earn points when your code computes the right outputs for all inputs. Pex4Fun features a code editor with auto-completion, snippets and background compilation to make programming on the phone a reality. If you are new to programming in general, don’t worry: Pex4fun also features a set of courses to learn the basics and beyond right from your phone.

As part of helping inspire students Sunderland Software City and Codeworks worked to togther to help promote The Microsoft Imagine Cup to North East. As you know from my previous post the Imagine Cup is an exciting opportunity for students to work together in teams to solve some of the worlds toughest problems, learn new skills, make new friends, win prizes.

So today Ben Nunney from Microsoft will be working with the teams from Sunderland Software City and Codeworks informing Students of the North East what the Imagine Cup is all about then on Friday 17th and Saturday 18th February particiaptes who except the challenge whisked off to a secret location for a 36 hour non-stop hackathon to work on their Imagine Cup projects

One of the key messages I hear when speaking with academics is, how can Microsoft help in inspiring my students? Well if you have students who are interested in technology how about setting them the following challenge!

Would you like the opportunity to change the world and potentially win a free trip to Sydney, Australia?

The Microsoft Imagine Cup, is the world's top student technology competition. Ever year Microsoft gives students a fantastic opportunity to envisage, create and deliver a technology solution that addresses the Imagine Cup slogan - "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems!"

If you interested in learning more watch the following video from academic Rob Miles from the University of Hull and also captain of the Imagine Cup Software Design competition. Rob shares his insight and gives you some more information on the Microsoft Imagine Cup opportunity.

Version 1.0 of the SDK and runtime are now available for download, and distribution partners in our twelve launch countries are starting to ship Kinect for Windows hardware, enabling companies to start to deploy their solutions.

The Surface 2 SUR40 is considerably less expensive than the first-generation device. Apart from the lower price, the main improvement is its much reduced size. The Surface 2 is now more like a coffee table with no bulky pedestal.

A really nice example of Surface + Microsoft technology application is a retail example was produced by Razorfish

The Kinect for Windows product group announced the upcoming release of their full commercial product in an official blog post on January 9. The new Kinect for Windows hardware and accompanying software will be available on February 1. It will be supported in 12 countries (United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and United Kingdom) at a suggested retail price of US$249.

Academics will still be able to use the Software Development Kit (SDK) with current Kinect for Xbox 360 sensors for non-commercial purposes and existing deployments that are licensed until 2016.

You now also have a route to write commercial applications. Monitor the Kinect for Windows site for updates.

New and updated samples, such as the Kinect Explorer, which enables developers to explore the full capabilities of the sensor and SDK, including audio beam and sound source angles, colour modes, depth modes, skeletal tracking, and motor controls

A commercial-ready installer which can be included in an application’s set-up program, making it easy to install the Kinect for Windows runtime and driver components for end-user deployments.